‘Thirteen Days’…of course. Good idea.
I guess the big K was very agonized by this whole thing. He was the last pres whom I thought actually had some integrity to him. I’m probably wrong.
My father was a USMC officer on active duty at the time. I was pretty young, but I remember knowing something was going on when he did not return home one day. Even my mother did not know where he was, other than that he was still on base. This happened before Kennedy announced the crises to the country. IIRC, it was several days before we saw him again.
So, from the military’s point of view, it was a very serious situation and they were prepared to meet it.
Gotta be careful using big K like this. Kennedy was always referred to as “JFK” in the press. The letter K by itself commonly referred to Khrushchev.
Not trying to get into a oneupmanship in re Missile Crisis movies, but “The Missiles of October” is one kickbutt movie. I liked it better than 13 Days. YMMV>
This flight did accidentally(?) stray into Soviet airspace over a sensitive area so they had a pausible excuse to shoot it down. One version I read said that it was mistaken for a US AWAC-type electronic spy plane, and the Soviets thought “aha! Finally we have a valid excuse to teach those USAF/CIA guys a lesson!” Other claims said the pilots should have been able to tell the aircraft type by markings and windows (and a 747 from a 707?), it was deliberate; others say they attacked from below and the rear from quite a distance so as to not get showered with debris and would not have seen clearly, etc.
Conspiracy types will argue that the navigation “error” was deliberate, some still think it had spy equipment on board too, etc.
Oddly, there was an identical problem a few years before where a KAL(?) jet from northern europe got navigationally confused and did a 180 near the pole, and ended up being forced down on a frozen lake in northern Russia. Not as big a deal was made of it, because most of the passengers survived.
Not to mention the fact that a flight numbered “007” must be on a spy mission!
The war games you are thinking of was exercise Able Archer. It was going on at the same time that the Soviet Union was running it’s own nuclear war predictive program called RYAN. All of the pieces that RYAN used to predict a first strike by the US on the Soviet Union were falling into place and some were convinced that Able Archer was a cover for a first strike by the US on the Soviet Union.
During this same period Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet missile commander was on watch when their missile warning system alerted that the US had launched missiles. He kept resetting the computer and did not launch a response. He was correct as the missile launches were really reflection off high level clouds that had been picked up by Soviet early warning systems. As a reward for saving the entire fucking world he was demoted.
The Wiki link covers most of the issues of the time and the You Tube link is to a very good documentary of the time. “1983 The Brink of the Apocalypse.” 90 minutes but well worth the time.
Later revelations of these incidents changed the mind of President Reagan who had earlier referred to the USSR as an ‘Evil Empire’. He and his advisors realized that they needed to open dialog with the USSR because the fear level was too high and the communication too low.
This eventually led to the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Very good reading and viewing in these links.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled Cuban Missile Crisis thread.
Oh, it was even better than that. The President of the John Birch Society (extreme anti-Commie) was on the plane. 007, JBS President…what’s not to love?
That extreme anti-commie JBP prez also happened to be a U. S. Congressman.
Still, I agree with your sentiment, harry – I can just tell there’s a mod note in your near future, which is why I didn’t write the above first. :eek:
If you want to learn more about the Cuban Missile Crisis:
A short and interesting (if somewhat biased) account by an insider, the President’s brother:
A much more detailed, process-oriented discussion of JFK’s calm, skillful handling of the situation:
A good account by a British historian, putting the Crisis in context with all of the other foreign policy headaches JFK had to deal with during his White House years:
This is an injustice?
Maybe he was well aware of the reliability of the computer.
(Maybe it was running an early version of Windows).